Year A

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

A Picture of the Harvest

Debbie and Diane are sitting together at a table in a restaurant. Diane asks Debbie about her hobbies. “Well,” says Debbie, “I suppose it is gardening.” “Wow,” says Diane. Debbie pauses and looks into the distance. “Well, to be honest, she says, I’m not a great gardener, especially when I try to grow flowers from seed. They never look as good as they do on the packet.” Then Debbie looks up and adds, “But did you know, the other day I discovered that my flowers never look as good as on the packet because the photos on the packet had been posed for by professional flowers.” This in every sense is talking about me because growing anything from seed has always been hard work and nothing ever looks as good for me as they do on the packet. It does seem that Jesus today as he looked out at the crowd is also well aware of how hard it is for seeds to grow into plants.

“Listen! Jesus says, A sower went out to sow.” Today, we hear the parable of the Sower, sometimes called the parable of the Soils. The parables of Jesus were designed to do exactly what this parable does: to turn upside down our preconceived notions of what the Kingdom of a decent, self-respecting God will look like. If we were in charge of the order of God’s Kingdom, it would most likely look like the fields of a successful, agricultural business today. A sower would have well-tilled fields, on land that had been prepared for planting. It would be a field with regular boundaries just the right size for the crop. A seed drill would put in one seed every so often in ruler straight rows. There would be irrigation and fertilizer and an automated tiller to deal with the weeds between rows.

The sower would keep a careful record of the yield, so he or she would know what to do differently next year, for better results. What a smart, sensible, cost-effective, efficient sower! But, today we learn from Jesus that when God sows, the picture is very different. This is old-fashioned broadcast sowing, seed flung in the air by the handful. It lands where it will. There is seed everywhere. There are no boundaries, no care-fully prepared soil. The whole world is the field; the seed is sown on all kinds of ground-rocks, thin soil, the main road, the weed patch. Some even makes it to good ground and everything is allowed to grow. Nothing is thinned out and discarded. And finally, the harvest is a delight, whatever it is: a hundredfold return, sixty, or thirty. It doesn’t matter; it’s the harvest! It doesn’t matter if the harvest looks as good as the picture on the packet.

What a God we have! Flinging the seed of the Kingdom far and wide, into the whole world, letting the seed have a try anywhere. Letting it grow in confidence that it will go where it is needed, rejoicing in the harvest, good and bad, expected and unexpected. It’s probably very good that we’re not in charge of the order of God’s kingdom, because it would most likely look a lot like the fields of the sower of the successful agricultural business today: orderly, controlled, full of the deserving and the good and the worthwhile people, a place where there are clear boundaries of right and wrong. A place where rules are applied without exception, where there is an eye to maximizing the yield; a place where most of us would not be admitted. None of us would be allowed into the God’s kingdom if it only admitted those who deserved to be there.       

So God’s approach of flinging seed makes a lot more sense. Especially, since we are not dealing with a God who is at all concerned about rules or boundaries. We are dealing with a God whose nature is abundance and grace filled love. Our God scatters seeds with indiscriminate abundance, without looking to see if they are likely to bear fruit. God accepts the reality that some seed, a goodly portion of it, will fall on bad soil, and yet God keeps sowing. Jesus kept spreading the word, no matter how dry, rocky, or weed-infested the ground. Throughout his earthly life Jesus was always running into the religious authorities who wanted to put fences around God’s Kingdom, to limit who could come in, to judge people on the basis of their merits and whether they were likely to produce a good crop of righteous deeds.

But, Jesus loved hanging out with those who knew their need of God. His favorite parties were those where everyone was invited, even the sinners and the outcast. He told parables like today’s parable that reversed everyone’s expectations about what God was up to in the world, and he ended up hanging on a cross but God raised him from the dead so that the world could see God’s abundant love. A love that isn’t for the select and deserving few, God does not redeem us and offer us eternal life because we deserve it. We don’t deserve God’s abundant forgiving love. God does these things because we have a sower who can’t help but love us—a sower who has a vision of the whole world as a blooming, fertile, fruitful field and who is prepared to sow the costly seed of redeeming love by the great handfuls into the world in order to make that vision a reality.

But to make that vision a reality, those who follow Jesus are called to do the same. If we know this Good News about God to be true, we are to also sow the seed abundantly without exception and boundaries. Knowing that we have no control, whether or not the path is hard, whether or not there is acceptance or understanding. Understanding, like faith, is a gift.  Faith challenges us to believe in God’s abundance and to proclaim that promise, even in the midst of rejection and the reality of this world. Considering the powerful opposition to the gospel—the evil one, hardened hearts, persecution, the anxiety-driven lure of wealth—it is a miracle that there are disciples at all and that the kingdom of God grows. The yields are miraculous because, ultimately, all growth comes from God. Opposition may eliminate much of the seed, but the remaining seeds yield abundant fruit.

The danger we must avoid is judging people on the basis of the “harvest” they produce because it’s not always easy to make the “harvest” look like the perfect flower. We are invited instead to be generous, to give and to serve freely, to treat everyone as deserving because they are, simply by virtue of being a person created in the image of God and loved infinitely by God, just as we are. This parable calls us to trust. Jesus knows the hard ways of this world. He also knows the abundant ways of God. The “therefore” to all of this is the call to spread seed extravagantly and to give thanks to God for fruitful growth. It doesn’t matter if the harvest looks as good as the picture on the packet because we have a generous God who will stop at nothing.